Saturday, May 10, 2014

So many emotions, so little life to express them

I keep hearing the phrase "woe is me" in my head, and then the Grammar Nazi part of me assesses that phrase as being incorrect. It should technically be "woe is I," and there you go, I can't even have a morose thought without fact-checking it first. And you know what, that's a little slice of the fried gold that is me. I have ADD thoughts and song lyrics and literary excerpts in there (in my mind) at any given time, and you either let me tell you what they are and deal with them, or I keep them inside and end up wandering the streets of Poughkeepsie, trying to sell people my hair. Your choice.

My mom is staying with me until Sunday, and I love having her here. Yes, she complains a lot, and yes, my apartment is not up to the Martha Stewart-living standards she would like, but I think, at long last, she is realizing that's not me. I've been a messy person my whole life. To clarify, I am not a dirty person; I am clean, my person is clean, but my living spaces and cars seem to amass with junk. I don't mean for this to happen, but as I proposed to her last night, "Would you rather be in a pristine living environment with no soul, or would you rather laugh until your stomach hurts?" She understood which was more important.

Ideally, I would be on the rich side and have a maid. It's not that I physically can't clean, it just that I feel my time is better spent elsewhere. Oh, how it used to piss off the ex-husband when I would say things like this, but I know better than anyone where the salvation of my sanity lies. I'll give you a hint: It's not cleaning the baseboards or figuring out where the eff the mop is and if it has enough squirty stuff. I can't deal with that stuff and have it look the way it should. I want to cook and decorate and make my place homey and inviting. Using my vacuum gives me a mild headache.

We all have our special talents. Domesticity in the strictest sense of the word, is not mine. I don't want to make my own floor cleaner or laundry detergent. I give the biggest props to those that can and do. I just want shit to be clean and me not have to deal with it. Yes, I'm a snob...a poor snob, but with standards, and yes, I'm a spoiled pain in the ass, but I was the youngest, and my parents taught me nothing outside making my bed and occasionally folding laundry. They once made me rake leaves, and I sang a slave spiritual until it got on my dad's nerves so bad, he told me to go back inside.

The more time I spend with my mom, my only surviving parent, the more I wonder what I'm gonna be like in 40 years. Will I have a kid (s) to hang out with me when I'm in my 70s? I'm in this weird dating limbo that feels like a Delorian and flux capacitors should be involved with Christopher Lloyd. I'm a bad dater. I vacillate between aloof cool awesome chick and needy, crazy "why don't you love me" chick. It's not a good mix. I simply don't know how to be. I loved, I lost, and I should be able to be normal about the next steps, but it's that normal part that's tripping me up. Whatever happened to being silently unhappy in a bad marriage until someone has a heart attack? That's what I was promised. KIDDING. I want to be deliriously happy, skipping through the daisies happy. I just don't know that I'm capable anymore.

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